Mach was!? (Do something!?) is the title of an old Swabian jazzrock record that pretty much expresses what this blog is about. Its entries talk about the relation between being and becoming, self-actualization and social change. This is how I perceived and questioned reality at each given point in time, not a statement of absolute truth, a call for getting excited, or a reason for feeling criticized personally.
But if you must, you must, of course.

2016-04-29

Have you seen the “This Happens Only In INDIA” album? Damn, this
not only makes me laugh out loud, it makes me emotional with feeling so
intensely at home in India. Those photographs are the counterpiece to my
returning to Germany and obersving how much people take care to avoid
any potentially dangerous or embarrassing situation, how they go to
great lenghts explaining to others what the rules are and how things are
supposed to be, and how they police others into surrendering e.g. to traffic rules or neighbourly behaviour. What a miserable neighbourhood that is.

In India, so much is being done without using the mind, without
referring to regulations, without anxiousness about future
reverberations. Yes, there are rules. Masses and masses of rules,
and laws and regulations. But where there is no prosecutor, there is no
judge – a saying from a tiny 80-Million-folks country called Germany
that is most widely applied in an India of 1.3 billion, and guess what –
they still don't have anarchy there. And yes, things are breaking
down. Falling out of order all the time. Not working out in the first
place, thanks to human error. But who cares; for sooner or later it
would have happened anyway due to the demanding climate and the
countless disintegrating animals the Tamils call 'poochi' which show us
all too clearly that there is little benefit in looking far ahead.
Indians can advise every Western punk what it truly means to live a
no-future attitude.

When I see all those efforts made regarding
standardization of tools, improving food hygiene, or forcing people into
wearing helmets on their motorbikes, it really makes me sad how energy
is wasted on creating a false safety that has no basis in this clime and
culture. But I guess it only follows that first step of India having
swallowed the consumerist lure. Please, please, India. Get tired of it faster than me.

2016-04-24

After hours of nightly contemplating the immense depth and amount of
corruption, incompetence and insincerity I have the doubtful honour of
being allowed to witness and which affects my life on a daily basis I
felt like I needed a shot of Heavy Metal to keep my mind from further
spiralling into negativity again. Metal has always been my drug of
choice which helped me kill the pain of living in this age, and I am
aware of it for quite some time. As a consequence, I stopped listening to music almost completely for a few years.
There is yet another quality to Metal that I was not aware of, which I
was constantly seeking to apply, though: to have someone scream at the
evil in man and to have them shout with rage, and spit in the faces of
the gods that failed.

Seeing things a bit different today, my return to screeching guitars,
galloping basses, thundering drums and voices like air-raid sirens
became sort of an amusing bed-in which presented me with the question
who these people were shouting at. The greed, the ignorance, the
imposture, the make-believe, the displays of incompetence in
compensating for incompetence*, they are all rather laughable than
enraging. We are players in a charade called Auroville, and if we didn't
have it all backwards it could be such an enjoyable experience, like a
child's birthday. And you out there who would smirk or snort at my
utterings, you are completely right, though probably for the wrong
reasons. For you are like us, because we are like you.

(* German =
Inkompetenzkompensationsinkompetenz. I accidently found this in a
dictionary and just couldn't resist. Yays for compound words!)

2016-04-22

Talking about Naxals - if you thought the famous scene on politics in "Life of
Brian" was just a joke, check out the following (from Wikipedia):

"A Naxal or Naxalite is a member of any of the Communist guerrilla
groups in India, mostly associated with the Communist Party of India
(Maoist) ... Their origin can be traced to the split in 1967 of the
Communist Party of India (Marxist), leading to the formation of the
Communist Party of India (Marxist–Leninist)."

As opposed to what people in the West think the Communist movement is by far not dead. In some places it is rather deadly.

2016-04-19

At the end of my last posting I asked the question, Leaving culture
aside, not negating it, but looking beyond it -- what do we see?
This sentence came as sort of a surprise to me. I have been playing with
the eye sight metaphor, intending to point at a view that overcomes the
separation at the core of our crises. Yet what popped up was a genuine
question that went one step further and to which I did not have an
answer myself: who are we? I better go pondering the more personal version of it first... lol

2016-04-18

One famous Indian once said that it was not a measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.
I would like to add that, in turn, it is not a sign of health in a
society when it is unable to accept, and integrate itself into, the
suchness of existence. If it has, at its basis, the idea of improving on
nature it is well on its way to insanity. For in that case it regards itself -- culture -- as external to, and separate from, nature, a category it introduces to name the thing it seeks to manipulate and control.
And the whole practice of substituting vitamin pills for fruits,
plastic packaging for freshness, hydroponics for soil, legal bondage for
empathic relationships, social insurance for compassion, money for
trust, horsepower for horses, governance for personal responsibility,
rational for reasonable, and all the rest of it, reeks of manipulation.

Science and technology, along with politics and religion, are fine as
far as they go, but as solutions to our crisis they must fail, for they
are expressions of the paradigm of separateness from, and control over,
'nature'. They can reveal aspects of reality, yet in no way can they
claim to be the only way, or source, of knowledge that there is. For
their understanding of reality is limited while existence is infinitely
larger and deeper than their rational scope.

We have observed
what came from giving way to pure rationality. Just look at the world of
today. If we are engulfed in conflict and misery it is because, among
others, rationalism lacks an ethical dimension, a social dimension, a
spiritual dimension, and an emotional dimension, all of which are
defining us as human beings. That which is 'irrational' is part of
reality -- the totality of existence. The sense for it is not a glitch, a
dysfunction, or a human disease, but exists for a reason. When we
exclude it from our 'calculation' we are ignoring the deeper roots of
the world's condition, and therefore the way forward, both of which
literally lie outside science's view and technology's grasp.

Our
society may be profoundly sick (or maybe it is just a passing
adolescent phase), but as a species, we are neither dysfunctional
mutations nor diseased miscreations (born sinners, as the Bible goes);
we are wearing cultural glasses that impair our sight. Leaving culture
aside, not negating it, but looking beyond it -- what do we see?

2016-04-07

Last night I thought, When I am in a state of delusion I am running in
circles; that means, I am on a path going nowhere – as opposed to when
there is clarity and I am on an path to Nowhere. Any way (sic!), there
is nowhere to go; I am, we all are, there already. Woke up this morning to find that it is true; so far, I have reached nowhere.

2016-04-06

"We who are asleep must open our eyes and look about us. We must not
accept the injustice of our enslavement by telling ourselves it is our
fate, as if we have no true feelings; we must dare to stand up for
change. We must crush all these institutions that use caste to bully us
into submission, and demonstrate that among human beings there are none
who are high or low. Those who have found their happiness by exploiting
us are not going to go easily. It is we who have to place them where
they belong and bring about a changed and just society where all are
equal." — Bama, in her autobiographical novel "Karukku"